Most screens has a resolution of 800x600 pixels.
Many has screenresolutions of 640x480 or 1024x768 pixels.
Very few users have other screen-resolutions.
(Note: You can see the exact current screen-stats on our main page.)
If you compare the resolutions it looks like this:
As you can see the proportions are the same.
The height is 3/4 of the width - no matter which resolution we're using.
In the above example you should notice that it shows how much content will fit on the screen. Not how the screen actually looks. As we allready mentioned above,
screens set up to higher resolutions are not necessarily physically bigger than screens set up to low resolutions.
Now if we place the same red image on each screen it will look like this:
The example shows that
screens set up to high resolutions simply compresses the content more than screens set up to low resolutions.
The compression, however, happens without loss of details, since the high resolution simply has more pixels on the screen.
If you looked at the high resolution page through a magnifying glass you would see that even though the content is compressed it still has all the details from the low resolution page.
Another way to put it, is that an image viewed on a 30" monitor at a resolution of 1600x1200 pixel - looks exactly the same as if the image was seen on a 15" monitor set up to show 800x600 pixels.